World News

President Xi Jinping has led an unprecedented crackdown on lawyers, NGOs, academics and journalists. Information is more tightly controlled by the Communist Party than it's been since the Mao years.

U.S. airstrikes helped U.S.-backed forces oust ISIS from the Syrian city. Steve Inskeep talks to James Jeffrey, former ambassador to Iraq and Turkey, who says the U.S. will have to stay engaged there.

The killing of Maltese reporter Daphne Caruana Galizia has drawn international condemnation. "My mother was assassinated," her son said.

Toronto leads this year's UBS Wealth Management list as the city with the biggest housing bubble risk. Real estate in several U.S. cities, including New York and Boston, is considered fair value.

China's ruling Communist Party's 19th national congress will likely decide the country's leadership lineup for the next five to 10 years. While leaders will go all out to present a facade of orderly transition and party unity, analysts believe that the facade conceals some brutal political power struggles, due in part to a lack of clear rules in China about how power is transferred.

U.S.-backed forces are close to finishing the battle to push ISIS from its de facto capital, Raqqa. Doing so will leave little territory remaining for the so-called Islamic State that once ruled a large swatch of Iraq and Syria. It also leave the city in ruins and with an uncertain future.

NPR's Mary Louise Kelly speaks with reporter Joby Warrick of The Washington Post and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book "Black Flags: The Rise Of ISIS" about the status of ISIS after the loss of their de facto capitol, Raqqa.

NPR's Mary Louise Kelly speaks with Yahoo News chief investigative correspondent Michael Isikoff about how Russian trolls were ordered to watch Neflix's House of Cards show to understand Americans and U.S. politics.

The U.S. is training and equipping both sides in the Iraq-Kurdistan stand-off along with Syrian opposition forces in the battle against ISIS and the Assad regime. It has created a tangled web with no clear end game.

The festival has been blamed for cloaking New Delhi and other cities in an unhealthy haze, but the solution has drawn plenty of criticism.

"Dictators see free, fair election as a threat," Monovithya Kem tells NPR. Her father, opposition leader Kem Sokha, is in jail on charges — which he denies — of trying to overthrow the government.

In an interview with NPR's Here & Now about his new documentary, Wasted! The Story of Food Waste, the chef drives home the size of the problem and the importance of changing our perspective.